


Blue in Your Eyes

by Mooninmie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Brief Depictions of Violence, Brief Sexual Situations, Greg Lestrade-centric, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Near Death Experience, Non-Linear Narrative, original character death, technically explicit but not enough to warrant an upgrade in rating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 10:28:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30070887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mooninmie/pseuds/Mooninmie
Summary: Greg never really figured out how to fill a silence with intention.aka,Greg is in love, has siblings, and is doing his best.
Relationships: Greg Lestrade/John Watson
Kudos: 2





	Blue in Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up, the drugs/suicide thing isnt of John, Greg, or Sherlock. If that worried you. Also, I’m not French or a Brit so cut me some slack if my Americanisms mess up the flow of the piece now and then ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Greg presses his face into John’s hair, breathing in the scent of sweat and grime and the faded, clinging waft of nondescript shampoo. John’s hands clench the lapels of his leather jacket, wrinkling the fabric in his fists, and Greg is sure that the zippers are biting into his palms.

“John?”

John tenses beneath him and lets out a shaking breath, his grip tightening and loosening in rhythmic intensity. “Shush,” he orders. “Just… quiet. Please.” 

His voice is hardly a whisper, dangling thinly in the air around them on a thread. His breath is warm through Greg’s shirt, just below where his forehead is resting equally as warm on his chest.

Greg slides his hand beneath John’s coat, the ice of his fingers warming with John’s body heat on his hunched back. John sighs through his nose, and his trembling hands loosen, allowing Greg to keep him firm in the embrace. They’re sheltered from the world, wrapped in a protective barrier of coats. 

The streetlights bounce in a white, moonlit glare off of the pavement. For the last few days the entirety of London has been kept damp with rain that hesitated between refreshing drizzle and heavy downpour, dragging all of the occupants in the city down a sluggish slope of never-ending muck.

The remaining couple of police cars sit idly in a single file on the side of the slim road. Their beacon lights glare brightly in fluorescent blue. A young officer is marching absently back and forth outside of the entrance to the dilapidated abandoned building, stopping every once in a while to peek wearily beyond the police-taped entrance at his colleagues brushing over the contents that weren’t taken by forensics for the last time in the evening. 

Over John’s head and across the street, Sherlock catches Greg’s eye. His lean figure is swathed in heavy, cool blues and greys and purples, gloved hands shoved deep in his pockets. 

He watches them a moment and even with the couple of yards of separation his scrutiny is intense, digging through their layers to the skin underneath, and Greg itches. They’re silent. Sherlock’s look is unreadable.

There’s a decision, maybe. Sherlock blinks and dips his head, flipping his thick collar over his rosy cheeks and stalking off towards the main road without so much as a second look. He slips one hand from his pocket and raises it preemptively to hail a cab, disappearing around the corner.

A shift. A sigh. Greg feels a tentative, misty drop of water land on his neck, rolling coldly over his nape. He closes his eyes and brushes a kiss over the top of John’s head, the ashy blonde strands tickling his lips. 

“Sorry,” John says eventually, pained and quiet. “I don’t…” he swallows. “Sorry.” His clever hands drop the leather and crawl along the stitched end of Greg’s shirt, skimming under to the warm sides and hips underneath. Goosebumps erupt along his arms, shocked at the sudden chilly infiltration. 

Greg shakes his head. The rain has picked up, and his silver hair dampens. The sky is grey and dim, and the air smells like drenched cigarette smoke, but his heart is filled three times over, because John is alive and solid in his arms. 

He wants to say that he loves him; loves his eyes and his lips and his hands, trembling now but he doesn’t mind, because they’re still John’s, ordinarily so steady. Doctor hands. Soldier hands. Dependable, and skilled, taking and giving life with equal competency, and they’re so lovely that Greg thinks he could melt under them with a particularly strategic touch. He would. He would, if only John wanted. If only.

“It’s raining,” he murmurs instead. John gasps out a wet laugh, his fingers running up Greg’s back. He adds pressure to his touch to push aside the thin layer of skin, bumping a trail on the notches in Greg’s spine. The grey fabric of his shirt bunches away from the belt it was tucked in just a few minutes ago, and a small strip of the sensitive flesh is exposed to the crisp air.

He nods clumsily, his hair rubbing on Greg’s chin. “It’s London,” he answers dryly. “It’s always raining.”

They’re silent for a minute. John straightens slowly and buries his head on Greg’s shoulder. Greg watches as water collects gradually in John’s hair, dripping heavily down his temple and behind his ear and over his neck. 

They’ll catch a cold, maybe, but John is warm - burning, almost, where they’re lined together, but his hands are starkly freezing on Greg’s back, and the combined bundle of their coats keeps most of the rain off of them. Just a few more minutes. 

The water accumulates in puddles and Greg looks down at their distorted, aggravated reflection, rippling in waves with the rain and the glare of the streetlight. John sighs, the breath blowing past Greg’s earlobe.

“Come back to my flat,” Greg hears himself say. He waits, John’s hands tracing absent patterns over his spine and his rounded edges and the valleys of his ribs.

Greg thinks that he might feel John’s smile against his neck. “Okay,” he breathes. His voice burns. Greg is freezing, now, but his thoughts from earlier hold true. He could melt like this.

-

When Greg was little, so long ago that the memories are weeping and muddled - merely vague impressions of what might have happened, or who might have been there, or what he might have felt - he nearly died. 

Trying to pull up the memory is like trying to swim in a tub of molasses, tacky and sweet and drowsy, dragging his thoughts deep into the recesses of half-forgotten summer days covered in a soft, fond blue, positively buried under vague ideas of adventure and youth. The only reason he’s sure it even happened is because his grandmother, a little, graceful lady with a sharp, quick tongue, used to remind him of it when she felt he was being particularly disobedient. 

_“Gregory!”_ She’d scold, her accent thick and covered in the skipping, romantic lulls of practiced french, whenever she bothered to speak in english, _“You bad boy! Do you not remember the last time you refused to listen? Hm? You cause so much trouble, you are lucky we even keep you!”_

She’d tut, and threaten, and Greg would grin at her with rakish playfulness, but would always, always come around to do as she said, because the jagged, scraped scars across his front and side were fresh, the skin on his arm was still flaky and peeling where it had been covered with a cast, and even though it was healed he was sure that he could feel a painful twinge in his neck if he moved it too confidently.

It was only a little overstep, really; he would always go a little farther, a little higher up the glistening rocks, his nails scraping into the grit and bare feet pressed suredly into the inch-wide ledges. The cliff loomed and his twin sister, Alice, splashed in the water yards below him, egging him on with her hands cupped around her mouth, the two of them isolated on that little section of coastline in southern France.

Their grandparents always thought that Philip, their older brother, was watching them, but he was 13 and found more enjoyment in the sun when the daylight was spent on lonely walks in the sand and through the stretches of tall, dewy grass and wildflowers. He told them to be safe, making the two 8-year-olds promise, and left them to their own devices, because he was never told outright to keep an eye on them. Alice had kicked their sandals into a tiny cove, hidden from the tide, and craned her neck to watch Greg where he dangled above her. 

He thinks that there might have been a yell of some kind, and his hand slipped, sending him flailing down the crumbling edge. His shirt rode up his chest and ripped itself to shatters along with his skin, the blood staining the damp rocks in bright, freckled red, and Greg was caught in a few seconds of tumbling blue; the sea and the sky and Alice’s swimsuit, and then he hit the ground and his neck snapped nearly in half. 

The hospital was always so white, blinding in its straining intensity. His arm was thoroughly, snugly plastered in a cast, and he must have hit it on the way down, because he thinks that if he was going to break his arm on impact he’d at least have the sense to use the support to avoid breaking his neck too.

His parents flew in from England, taking the longest holiday from their jobs he could remember, even though his grandparents always invited them to come along during the summer with him and his siblings. His father berated Philip in snips he caught whenever he woke, his voice disapproving and cutting, and Alice stood on her tiptoes by his bedside or kicked her feet in a chair that was too big for her, and his Grandpa pat his knee with an expression of grim sympathy he could hardly see beyond the neck brace.

Philip stayed behind when the school year came back around and it was time to return to England. He grinned in his distant, odd way at Greg, and patted him and Alice on their heads.

“You aren’t coming?” He remembers asking. In reality he probably already knew Philip wouldn’t be following, because he didn’t pack a bag and somebody surely would have told him, but the memory is dreamy and Philip’s grin is safe in the idealistic warmth that seeps from older brothers witnessed through rose-coloured glasses, so it doesn’t matter much.

Philip’s hair was messy, always a bed-headed auburn, but it grows and shrinks uncertainly as he shakes his head and Greg tries to decide how long it was. “No,” he answered simply. He probably said something more important, something profound, because he wrote like the world was built from the ink in his pen and Greg always thought that it was a waste for all those words to stay trapped in his head.

But maybe he said nothing at all. Philip always was good at that; he knew how to make silence sound like love, or contempt, or the endless expanse of more and all that needed to be said, staining the air with meaning like the drip of black from an old ballpoint stains notebook paper. Greg remembers this silence as a bittersweet affection. He remembers this silence as goodbye.

Alice’s little hand fit tightly in his and they pulled each other along, their rolling suitcases clicking behind them in the grooves of the airport tiles, or the old ceramic in their grandparents’ kitchen, or the cobblestone on their front drive. It could be any, or it could be all, and Greg isn’t sure, really, but he is sure that he left the blue that colored those days of childhood behind with Philip in the sunny south of France.

-

“Do you play?” Greg asks, watching over the back of the couch as John lets his fingers hover over the polished wood of his guitar. John glances at him for half a second, his hair dripping with warm water onto the damp towel resting limply around his neck.

He hums, and lowers his hand, patting at the pajama bottoms Greg lent to him. “My da taught me,” he answers, still looking at the engravings with an impressed admiration, and Greg silently agrees with a smug little smile. The acoustic was a gift from Alice, years ago. “Fancied himself a musician. Wanted to, anyway.”

Greg watches the moisture travel down John’s jaw, his Adam’s apple bobbing slightly, and soak into the front of the white undershirt he was wearing beneath the layers upon layers always covering him. 

A little thought pops up in the back of Greg’s head, telling him that John’s arms are bare, and that’s not wrong, but it’s new, because even in all the years he’s known him, he’s hardly seen anything beyond his hands. There’s modest definition in his biceps and his veins lift almost shyly along his forearms, drawn out from his hot shower. Greg knows without looking that the steam is still clinging to the bathroom mirror.

A twisted, ghostly scatter of scars bleeds from the shirt sleeve on his left arm, curling into his inner arm and stopping abruptly in a great, jagged horizontal line right under his elbow. He looks up and catches John’s eyes, who looks at him with a curious, knowing humor on his lips. He absently rubs at the jagged line, trailing his thumb over the tissue, and Greg stares for another somewhat acceptable half-second, even as the cheap flush of nervous embarrassment blooms on his neck.

“Well, I say taught,” John trails off, and Greg needs to take a moment to catch up to the conversation again. His hand hovers for another second. “You mind?” he prompts, and when Greg shakes his head no, he reaches out to strum the tips of his fingers over the crisp strings, the sound ringing out promisingly, before hoisting the instrument off of the wall. 

He slips it into his grip and plucks at the strings, individually this time, with practiced care. He turns the tuning knob just barely, and, satisfied, paces a short distance across the room. 

Greg says, “Your dad wanted to be a musician?”

John nods solemnly, playing a few chords, his fingers stuttering unsurely when he switches and a wry, self-deprecating laughter gleams in his eye. “Yeah. Wasn’t good enough, though, so he forced me into it.”

Greg leans his chin on his forearm, watching John’s fingers dance lightly in a short, smiling melody. “You ever good enough, then?”

The gleam in John’s eye stretches and he shoots a playfully inside smirk at Greg, like they’re sharing a special joke. “Good enough for him? No, never.” He sighs through his nose and presses his palm flat over the strings, the vibrations halting with a jerkily uncomfortable suddenness. “But I wasn’t so bad. He made me join band for a few years at school, you know.”

Greg raises his eyebrows and keeps his eyes on John as he walks leisurely through the space, rounding the dark grey couch. “Yeah?”

“Mm, yeah,” John hums, “I think he wanted me to pick up bass guitar.”

“Did you?”

John smirks again, the secret, playful joke, and replies, “I picked up the clarinet. Bloody awful at it, too.” This wrenches a happy chuckle from Greg, and John drops comfortably onto the couch against a maroon throw pillow with the grin still dancing on his face (because it’s not just his lips, but his whole face - the gleam in his eye, and the rounding of his cheeks; the wrinkles of a life well-lived and the lively shake in his features when he glances at Greg). 

He tucks one socked foot under his other leg and pulls the guitar to his chest, humming subconsciously to match the chord he strums out. “I used to butcher it around the house, and it drove my family absolutely barmy. Da would get so angry his face would turn red -” Greg raises his eyebrows again, and John’s shoulders rattle with mirth, “yeah, red, I swear. He’d tell me to shut it, and I’d tell him that he’s the one who made me join in the first place. It was…” he pauses shortly in exasperated remembrance, and glances towards the ceiling, his tongue stalling in his open mouth, “so petty.”

“He must have hated you for that,” Greg laughs again, just a little, and John’s expression stays playful, but it turns vaguely bitter. 

John replies, his words floating on a mock-wistful sigh, “You have no idea.” He leaves no room for reply, instead strumming the opening to some soft song Greg doesn’t remember the name to, and listens with contentment as the music thrums through his sitting room.

-

In Uni, mid term, Greg picked up the guitar. It was on a whim. Kind of.

His dorm-assigned roommate had no qualms ignoring the unspoken code of unwanted roommates, in that he bothered Greg, and did not stop bothering him all the way up until he saved up enough money from his subpar retail job to pay for an equally subpar apartment a few miles from campus. 

Oliver spent his time skimming obnoxiously too-large books and walked around with an empty moleskine notebook, but he had a cute grin and floppy hair that fell into his doe eyes. He spoke incessantly but never said anything, droning on about philosophers and classic literature and the semantics of semicolons versus periods, half of his arguments most certainly stolen from something he read in those books.

His speech patterns were akin to a particularly flowery 18th century poet and he looked at Greg with a strange quirk in his lips, and it was cute. He called Greg _“Gregory”_ , dragging out the vowels unpleasantly like the name stuck to the top of his mouth, and Greg would send him a glare that always drew out the odd quirk, as if it was a game of push and pull and Greg was simply being coy. That was decidedly not cute.

Greg spent hours in the evening hunched over his schoolwork, or composing letters to Philip, and Oliver would perch himself at the edge of the desk, his wide hands so at odds with the rest of his lithe frame. They were not writer’s hands, he remembers thinking idly, and Oliver caught his eye. 

“You need to let off some of that tension, Gregory,” he said, and Greg stared up at him with purple shadows under his eyes. 

He worked out to let off tension multiple days a week, and he thought that Oliver was simply being presumptuous, so he just stared at him and replied, “Yeah?”

Oliver pursed his lips and nodded solemnly, a most decidedly presumptuous look in his eyes. “Most definitely. You need to pick up an art- you’re not a writer,” and Greg thought (but didn’t say), neither are you, with his mind hovering on the crisp, unused points of Oliver’s pens, abandoned in his pretentious pencil holder, “or a painter, I’m sure, but you could certainly find something you fancy.”

Greg had already looked back down at his desk, Philip’s most recent letter, dated from nearly two months ago, smoothed out carefully beside his own blank sheet. Philip’s words dripped from the page, a loving cacophony of distant affection from his wanderings on the continent. 

He spoke and wrote better French than English, and so his letters were written in an endless stream of cursived French, and Oliver had been nearly beside himself with misplaced excitement when he first saw the familiar greeting of _“Mon cher frère, Gregory”_ , traced in steady black ink. He plucked stories of secret lovers and distant royal relatives out of thin air before Greg tersely told him that Philip was his very not-royal brother. 

“Oh, yeah?” Greg prompted absently, and Oliver nodded again, his voice picking up in its overly posh tones into a rant on the benefits of artistic expression, or something along those lines, because Greg wasn’t listening, not really. He stared absently at the well wishes and lost pleas in Philip’s writing, his pencil twitching in his right hand. 

He thought about the short stories Philip had written and sent to him when he was younger, of adventures in distant lands and detective stories and everything that a boy could ever want, his brilliant words still a poor supplement for an older brother. He thought about Alice and her charcoaled hands, of paintings bursting with color and little molded clay figures drying in the sun, still lifes in the palm of her hand.

His parchment was still empty on his desk a week later, when he returned to their room with a cheap, second or third hand guitar and a book of chords and simple folk melodies in much the same condition. 

Oliver talked less when Greg was busy guiding his fingers over the strings, biting pleasantly into the tips and leaving roughened callouses. He would peek silently over the top of his book and watch Greg with a smug quirk in his lips. Uncute. Greg stubbornly refused to acknowledge it.

On graduation day Alice surprised him with a brand new acoustic, dark wood gleaming in the light. Engraved sharply around the strings was a series of wild, crashing waves, and Greg had thought of their isolated strip of shore along the ocean, and smiled. Philip was not there to hear him play it.

-

Greg stumbles out of his bedroom with the dim idea that it’s two in the morning, as was helpfully supplied by the red numbers on his bedside table. He turns to the left, intending to walk just the few steps to his little bathroom, but there’s a flicker of movement in the dark and his entire body alights with adrenaline and shock, and with his heart in his throat he snaps towards the nameless assailant-

And it’s just John, leaning quietly against the granite in his kitchen, his entire frame awash in dreamy moonlight from the open curtains on the other side of the room. He’s cradling a full cup of tea in his hands, the liquid glinting tellingly even though the steam has long fanned itself away with the dust that danced playfully in the low beams of light.

“Christ,” Greg gasps, dropping against the doorway with a huff. “You’ll give me a heart attack, mate.”

John’s lips quirk briefly, and Greg thinks he can physically feel it as his eyes skim over him, like a lover’s touch. He whispers, his voice slow and honey-like, golden in the dark, “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

Greg shakes his head, and wonders vaguely that he truly hadn’t heard John, moving in an unfamiliar environment right outside his bedroom door. Greg had never particularly fancied himself a light sleeper, but he liked to think that he had the ability to snap into alertness when it was needed. A little inkling of doubt wiggled itself into this notion. 

“No, you- you didn’t,” Greg straightened himself up against the doorway, sliding his rough hand up the chipping paint for support. He leans curiously to peek beyond the fridge at the kettle, still full, save for the useless cup in John’s hands, and lets his gaze meander up to the cupboard where he keeps his tea. He looks at John, a silent question.

John’s tongue pokes out the wet his bottom lip and he raises the cup, but only presses his strangely pleasant smile into the rim, and Greg thinks that it looks a little sad, like the odd grin Philip always gave, and he can’t look away. The tea remains untouched. 

John says, murmuring into the ripples of his long-cold drink, “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” Greg answers, because he doesn’t; really, really doesn’t. Thinks that maybe, if John wanted to use up the entirety of his tea stash, and not drink a single drop, he still wouldn’t mind. Not really. “I just- well, you were quiet. Er,” he straightens his spine again, and feels exposed in the cooling air of his flat, his ratty t-shirt draped over his chest. He lowers his voice, matching the intimate whispers John was using, “I… didn’t hear you. That’s all.” 

The addition still feels silly, but John’s smile only takes on a layer of unpleasant, grim amusement (and it’s still so beautiful, Greg thinks, (but does not say,) even though it’s not so odd anymore, but honest, intimate even, in its upset, and it feels special, even as it twists a weak feeling of uneasy _something_ in his gut) and he nods understandingly. 

John toes his socked foot over the polished wooden floor. “Right. I, ah…” his head drifts slowly to one side in a soothing lull, “it’s a habit. Uhm, silence. I didn’t mean to wake you, but I guess now that you’re awake, it’s…” he hums low in his throat, searching, and finishes, “unsettling. Sorry. About that.”

Greg shakes his head again, and realizes belatedly that he may look a bit ridiculous, shrouded in darkness and jerking his head back and forth like a bobblehead that’s just been flicked. He calms his self consciousness by running his fingers through the tangles in his hair, flattening the awkward, sleep-mangled remains. 

He thinks he can feel John’s eyes on him as he does it, like his own hands were replaced with John’s quick, clever fingers, touching and brushing and pulling. He thinks it’s wishful thinking. He thinks it doesn’t matter much, because this feels just like a dream, exactly like a memory, but John is still firm and steadfast on the cheap flooring in his cornered kitchen, and he stares at Greg, maybe, though he can’t be sure, but he feels his gaze searching, searching, settling all over his face, and it burns, it melts, but his feet are starting to freeze and his bladder is set to burst.

He swallows and turns, taking the few steps to the loo and slipping inside without turning on a light. He patters about in the darkness and does his business, wincing when the ice water trickles from the steel faucet onto his warm hands.

When he steps out of the bathroom again, the cup John was using is filled with water in the kitchen sink, old tea poured down the drain. John is staring at the street below his window, a view half covered by the brick wall of the nextdoor building, but the moon still manages to squeeze into the sliver of sky that’s visible beyond the curtains. 

John looks down at the overflowing dumpster in the alleyway. “Nice view,” he deadpans, looking over at Greg with a slight twinkle in his tired eyes.

Greg snorts and joins him, stopping a respectable half foot from John, staring down at the trash. He replies, “The London experience.”

John laughs, just a little, a pleasant mixture between chuckle and giggle. It’s well-loved and frayed at the edges, like a library book that’s been checked out and read dozens of times over by all sorts, its pages filled with adventure and words that dance on the page with boyish delight. A selfish part of Greg thinks that he’d like to keep it for himself.

They’re silent for a moment, then John tilts towards him, and their arms touch, John’s shoulder resting below Greg’s. Greg reaches blindly in the dark and brushes his fingertips over the palm of John’s hand, and in response John grasps at him. His fingers are like ice.

Greg raises the hand and sandwiches it between his own, feeling the warmth of his hands filter into John’s skin. He holds the hand to his mouth, and doesn’t kiss it, but it’s a near thing; his lips hover, and he breathes softly over John’s knuckles. 

Then he shuts his eyes for a moment and squeezes John’s hand, surrounding it, adding a barrier between his lips and the cold skin.

John is staring at him. Greg thinks he should say something, maybe, but words are slipping down his throat and deconstructing in his head into a meaningless alphabet soup. He stays silent, and hopes that it holds weight, instead of hovering empty and uncomfortable, because he was never able to fill a silence with intention. 

I love you, he thinks as hard as he can, screaming it into the tangle of words and letters in his head, willing it into something tangible with the warmth of his palms. I love you. Can you tell?

John’s lips twitch into a grin, and Greg thinks that John can hear all he doesn’t say. 

-

Oliver sent him a message, years after they had parted and graduated, inviting him out for a coffee to catch up after seeing him in the papers for the first time. He had mellowed out, greeting Greg with pleasant friendliness and the cute quirk in his lips, lacking the invasive coyness Greg remembered. His floppy bangs were combed loosely to the side and his hazel eyes peered curiously from behind his glasses. He had worn contacts in Uni.

They chatted amiably for a while, working through their paper cup coffees, and Oliver’s eyes slid to the polished silver wedding band on Greg’s finger. Oliver asked, and Greg told him about his wife, Lily, and Oliver stared at him with a strange intentness, his eyes swimming with a thoughtfulness Greg didn’t remember.

“What?” Greg asked, raising his chin to match his eyes through the lenses. Oliver smiled, like Greg had just done something endearing, and shook his head.

He said, “Well, I just hadn’t taken you for the type,” and went back to dissecting his pastry. Greg thought, neither did I, but only watched Oliver squeeze the flaky inside of his croissant into a compressed ball and pop it into his mouth. Cute, maybe. Almost. 

Oliver raised his eyebrows, his eyes dancing with amusement, and Greg matched his eyes with a challenging sureness he didn’t feel. Oliver turned back to his croissant.

-

The first time John had been in Greg’s flat was after his divorce. It was nasty, and Greg resented the tan line on his finger, continually itching at it or rubbing where the ring used to be. 

John helped him move in, box after box of Greg’s life packed away and relocated to this home that wasn’t quite a home, yet, but it was away from Lily and so it meant something, though Greg wasn’t sure what. Maybe the fact that it meant anything at all is what made it matter. Days with Lily dragged and stifled, meaning absolutely nothing in noise and silence alike.

John set the last box onto the ground and stretched, the bones in his back cracking crisply, one after the other. Greg watched him turn beneath his layers and layers of jumpers and flannels and button ups, imagining the muscles beneath tan skin as John dragged his fingertip across the edge of one of the boxes labelled ‘albums’, full of old records, cassettes, and 8-tracks Greg hadn’t had the heart to throw out.

John sighs and perches himself beside him on one of the many boxes filled with his clothing. Greg fiddles with his lighter, itching for a cigarette but not having any to smoke, and feeling as though it’d be a damning way to spend a first day in a new place, anyhow. 

John studies him, and Greg can feel his eyes like appraising little pokes on his skin; it’s not annoying, really, but it brings to surface that childish want for John to shelter him. Pet his hair and hug him and pluck the lighter from his hand so that he won’t ever fill his lungs with smoke again.

John doesn’t do that, but their shoulders are touching, pushed together in steady camaraderie, and it’s enough, because John is his mate and his presence will always be enough. 

“A new beginning,” John hums into the room, resting his elbows on his knees. He’s turned his attention to the wooden flooring. He seems contemplative, almost wistful, in a bitter sort of way. Greg knows John had planned to propose to one of his girlfriends; had told him so, with a sad twist to his lips, in a dim pub. Her name was Mary. It didn’t turn out, and he didn’t ask. He wonders if that’s what he’s thinking of now.

Greg breathes deeply and thinks about John, and Sherlock, and Alice and his nieces and nephew, and his work, and decides that the only part he’d like gone would be Lily. So he replies, “Sort of,” and hopes that John understands because he’ll feel silly trying to explain it.

John grins and parrots, “Sort of.” 

Greg brushes his thumb across the smooth surface of the lighter and clicks his dull fingernail into the shallow engraving of his initials. John stares at his hand.

“Will you try quitting again?” He asks.

Greg frowns. He’d like to. “I don’t know,” he says, “But you know I’ve tried before. Never works.” 

John licks his lips and reaches out, taking hold of Greg’s hand. Greg’s traitorous heart flutters in his chest and John gently pries his loose fingers off of the lighter, plucking it from Greg’s hand. He admires the blocky, professional G.L. near the corner, brushing his own thumb the same place Greg’s had been just a moment before.

“I can keep this for you, if you like,” John offers, and his left hand is still resting on Greg’s upturned palm, like it’s normal. Greg hesitantly closes his fingers around the hand, and John smiles, his thin lips stretching beautifully to show a tiny peek of white teeth, like sunlight through a curtain. He adds, “As… collateral. If you want to quit.”

Greg blinks and feels his nerves alight with awareness as John’s hand twitches in his. “Yeah. Alright.”

John is still grinning as he tucks the lighter into his pocket.

-

Alice gets married about three years after Greg. Her marriage is much more successful. He sits with Lily at his side as Alice walks down the aisle with their aging father on her arm, glowing with youth and beauty and love. Her husband-to-be is crying. Greg didn’t cry at their wedding. He thinks Lily might be thinking the same thing.

-

It’s simple when he realizes it.

John’s eyes are blue, a deep, deep blue, like the hazy edges of your periphery on a clear summer day - that dark, distant blue that disappears when you raise your head to look for it, or the length of water in the depths of the ocean where the sunlight starts to dwindle and the unknown is a promise.

They’re so beautiful, and Greg might be lost, might be falling, might be gone, just a little bit. It doesn’t matter much, though, because John is still just John, with a dry joke that skips along the line between acceptable and dark on the tip of his tongue and a restless tapping in those deft fingers; his short nails click-click-clicking on the bartop, loud to Greg’s ears even in the constant chatter of the pub. 

He gazes quietly to the ceiling, scanning the wooden beams with what seems like intent focus, and Greg suddenly understands what Sherlock means when he says that he can hear somebody think. John thinks so loudly, everything he does is a little twist of expression of what’s going on inside his head, and it’s like watching a silent movie without the cards to tell you what’s been said.

The clicking stops, and a little flicker of smile graces John’s lips, and he’s awash in golden light, his eyes flecked with liquid sun, and he’s beautiful, gorgeous, and Greg is most definitely falling. John turns his head smoothly, catching his eye, and Greg is swallowed in blue.

-

“You’re in love with him,” Sherlock says one day. 

It’s an entirely unremarkable day, really. Greg’s coffee is a horrible sludge because he woke up too late to grab something he would actually enjoy, and the donut he had nabbed for breakfast from the break room was slightly stale. It sits only half-eaten on a thin napkin on his desk, and he slowly brushes crumbs from the report on his desk, his mind whirring to catch up with the absolute bombshell of a good morning Sherlock had greeted him with.

Finally he looks up at Sherlock. John is not with him, because he has a shift of locum work today, which he had told Greg in passing a day or two ago. Sherlock would know this, too, and his declaration has undoubtedly been strategized around this opening. 

Greg replies, “Did you want something, Sherlock?”

He expects Sherlock to scoff, or sniff indignantly, or roll his eyes and sigh or any other number of slightly preteen-ish reactions. Instead Sherlock stares at him intently, and there’s a soft look in those eyes of porcelain glass that surprises Greg. He swallows, and Sherlock seems abashed, sliding his eyes away.

“You are,” he repeats, and it’s not a question. 

Greg stares for another moment. He picks up the coffee and swallows a thick sip, and it goes down his throat with all the pleasantness of a bag of pebbles. He sets the coffee back down into the ring it’s made, right next to his unsatisfactory, old donut. Greg stares at his sad excuse for a breakfast contemplatively, wonders if John had a better one, and answers, finally, with the grim finality of a man on his way to the gallows, “Yeah.”

Sherlock looks thoughtful. He looks at his shoes, and then at Greg, and taps his finger in a quick thrum on his arm where they’re crossed over his chest. His eyebrows twitch agitatedly, and predictably, he begins to pace, an endless flurry of motion. 

Greg tracks him with his eyes warily. A young officer, new around the yard, stares through the glass window of Greg’s office with unbridled curiosity. Sherlock looks at her sharply and she scurries away.

Eventually Sherlock stops with an abrupt decisiveness and turns to Greg. His face twitches with restless, uncomfortable energy. “That’s very pedestrian of you, Lestrade.”

“John isn’t pedestrian,” Greg answers. 

Sherlock responds with a thoughtful hum and gazes at Greg levelly. “No,” he agrees. “He’s not.” There’s another short pause, layered with tension. Sherlock looks pained, his face contorting, and chokes out, “John is my friend. My best friend.”

Greg blinks at that, almost smiles, and absently swipes some more crumbs off the edge of his desk with his thumb. “I know.”

“I… care about him,” Sherlock says, and though he’s uncomfortable and his entire body fidgets, his words are heavy and serious, because it’s clearly the truth. He adds after a half-second of hesitation, “A lot.”

“I know,” Greg says again, and amusement curls in his chest, bringing a small grin to the surface. 

“He’s also the best man I’ve ever met, but you should never tell him I’ve said that. Bad for the ego. And I’m possibly biased.” He starts pacing again. “There are most definitely worse people in the world that he could choose to become romantically involved with, I know from experience. Dreadful, really, the amount of utterly dull, unworthy women I’ve seen him endure purely because he felt the need - John deserves much better than that, I’m sure you know. The best. But he’s not perfect, and I hope you’re aware of his shortcomings before you delve into a… _relationship_ that will inevitably impact the capabilities of both of you in the work were _you_ to do something unsavory and-”

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock raises his eyebrows at Greg in a haughty gesture, but he still fidgets, and he’s too uncertain in his own skin to properly cultivate that air of unreachable superiority that he’s so fond of. 

Greg thinks he might start laughing. “Is this your version of a shovel talk?”

Sherlock purses his lips, and a dull bloom of red floods high on his cheekbones. He sputters for a second, then seems to find humor in the situation, because he chuckles lowly, and Greg continues to grin.

“Yes,” Sherlock smiles almost bashfully. “I suppose I can… save you the speech.”

“Right. I won’t survive it if I hurt him, eh?”

“Well, Lestrade, you should know by now, I’d be an incredibly competent criminal.” Sherlock turns on his heel, facing Greg fully, and sets his hands on his hips, raising himself to his full height, his smile shifted to a mischievous smirk. “I’ve also got a gun and a very skilled surgeon as a partner. Best not to cross us.”

Greg laughs and shakes his head. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that about the gun.”

Sherlock smiles for a moment longer, but then the self-confidence seems to drain from him, collecting and evaporating in a puddle at the feet of his sleek, expensive shoes. Greg watches in a fascinating display of body language as Sherlock’s nervous fidgeting reestablishes itself into the conversation, his finger returning to its speedy drumming. 

“Romantic relationships are not my domain, as I’m sure you’re… aware.” Sherlock puffs out a breath and glances to the side, flicking his gaze over the entirety of Greg’s desk and hands and shoulders, everywhere but his eyes. “But John… cares about you in, well.” He clears his throat. “In that way. And I’m- _worried_ about the ramifications this may have on your friendship. And ours, admittedly, though that’s baseless insecurity and I hold no doubts towards John’s loyalty. I’m only worried. About John. And you.” He pauses, contemplates. “Because you two are my… friends.” Another pause. “That’s all.” Then, quickly: “Well-” Contemplation, decision. “Yes. That’s, uhm, all.”

Greg stares at Sherlock fondly, feeling young and dopey. Sherlock flicks his gaze at him, then away, then back again, and says with no lack of embarrassed disdain, “Oh, do stop gaping. You’re catching flies.”

Greg laughs, and laughs, and promises, “Sherlock, if John feels even an inkling of the way I do, I’ll treat him like a goddamn princess.” Sherlock laughs then, too, and Greg feels like a teenager, with Alice at his side and a crush on his mind. He laughs and thinks with sincerity, but does not say, that if John wanted the moon, he’d do all he could to give him the galaxy.

-

When they were thirteen, Alice caught Greg with a slightly older boy named Tom who had moved into a house down the street, their lips stuck together and limbs entwined on Greg’s bed. Tom had liked the traces of French in his accent, fresh from a summer spent with their grandparents and Philip, and told him so. 

They were both unsure of themselves, with awkward hands and too much teeth, too much tongue, but it was new and thrilling, and it had the same sense of giggly rightness that he had felt when he had first kissed a girl. 

Tom had launched himself away from Greg, his freckled face pale with horror, and Alice watched Greg’s reaction to it all with wide eyes from the doorway. Greg pressed his fingers to his lips, the ghost of Tom’s still hovering, and watched right back.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she blurted after an uncomfortable moment of electrified silence. “I promise.”

Greg stared at her grimly. He answered, “Okay. I believe you.” It’s the truth. They’re a team. They don’t rat each other out.

Alice nodded, satisfied, and tugged nervously on the braid that held her chestnut hair. She looked at Tom, and then back to Greg and, chewing on her lip, said, “Lunch is ready.” She retreated. 

Tom stared at the door, and his freckles jumped away from his skin. “Sorry,” he managed, strangled. His hands were trembling. “I gotta go. Sorry.” Then he retreated, too, and he didn’t bother to stay for lunch.

He avoided Greg for a solid two weeks before cracking and apologizing, again. He was ashamed of their friendship, of experimental kisses and touches and whispered confessions, guilt in the dark between sheets. Greg was not, but he never told Tom that. Maybe he should have, but it doesn’t matter anymore because Tom is a dreamy memory now.

-

John giggles breathily and Greg shudders, clutching at the muscles on his back. His skin simmers just below the surface, boiling into a red blush that paints his skin from his face all down his chest, where John’s hand is brushing loving little circles with his thumb around his nipple. 

“What’re you-” he breaks off with a strangled, pleasured ‘uhn’ when John shifts, pressing his hips flush against Greg, and doesn’t really have the presence of mind to feel properly embarrassed, “-laughing about?”

John pants into his ear, against his neck, wet and heavy and melting. He grasps at the layer of soft fat over hard muscles around Greg’s middle, and breathes in when Greg breathes out, kissing at a spot beneath his ear that Greg had forgotten was sensitive. It’s so painfully tender, and of course, of course John is perfect here, too, unraveling him with fingers and tongue and hips and cock until he can barely stitch together a thought beyond the pressing heat behind his eyes and between his legs and the buildup of emotion in his chest.

John lips at his earlobe and snaps his hips with calculated precision, wrenching out a mortifyingly unmasculine, honest-to-god _whine_ from his throat, and through the haze Greg knows that any self-respecting Englishman would feel some sort of shame in the face of it, but it’s mixed and diluted so thoroughly by the overwhelming sensation of John, and it doesn’t matter. Huffing out another soft laugh, John’s hand slips to sprawl across his ribs, right over his thudding, hummingbird quick heartbeat, and Greg swallows the spit that had welled up in his mouth.

John says, whispering with his nose pressed into Greg’s shaved sideburns, “It’s nothing. I’m only happy. You’re just so bloody handsome,” and Greg’s breath shakes pitifully, John’s cock pressed warmly against his prostate, a promise of more, if John decided to move, but Greg doesn’t ask him to. 

He skims his thumbnail along the border of the entrance wound on the back of John’s shoulder, and John hums, nosing his way across Greg’s cheek and dragging his lips in lazy kisses as he does so, ending his journey on Greg’s lips. “Alright?” he breathes, and Greg can smell the toothpaste on his tongue, and breathes it in, cold and sharp in the sweltering heat between them. 

John swipes his tongue on Greg’s upper lip, and the sensation trembles through him, alighting every nerve to the point of near oversensitivity, ending in his cock. It had gone flaccid, a little, in the process of entry, but it had recovered. He twitches around John, and answers, “Yes,” god, yes, a thousand times yes, “yeah. It’s just been a while since I had it like this,” and it’s you, and you’re perfect, and I could fall apart if you only just looked at me a little too long, a little too intensely.

“I won’t hurt you,” John says seriously, a promise, a reassurance, anything and everything.

Greg answers, even as his hole trembles over the stretch, and his chest aches with fire that tingles to the tips of his fingers and pulses in his wrists, “I know.” Then John, with his clever hands roaming and grounding and hips beginning to rock in a rhythm so subtle that Greg doesn’t even feel as he pulls out, only the sensation of pushing in again and again, kisses him with plying lips and an expressive tongue, and Greg is gone for him.

-

“You don’t love me anymore,” Lily told him. It was the truth. He didn’t say so.

The next day Lily added, as if a night of silence and turned backs hadn’t broken up their conversation, “We should get a divorce.” Greg agreed. 

-

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” John whispers into his shoulder. Greg is scooping up the rest of his dinner, and John is returning from the loo. His voice is small, and quiet, and his arms are wrapped around Greg’s chest from behind, his thumb brushing over his beating heart.

Greg wants it desperately to mean something.

“But it can,” Greg says, staring at the remains of alfredo sauce on his plate.

John nods and his breath tickles the nape of Greg’s neck. “It can.” He warns, “I’m a mess.”

Greg thinks about John awake at two am, staring into untouched tea in his kitchen. He thinks about Sherlock, and Mary, and guns, and crying in the rain. He kisses John’s wrist, chaste and meaningful, and replies, letting the kiss linger in a murmur on his skin, “I don’t mind.”

John breathes out shaky into his ragged nightshirt, and Greg doesn’t mention it if the next breath he takes hitches in his throat like a sob. He closes his eyes, and holds John's pulse against his lips.

-

Alice nursed a half empty mug of hot chocolate and gazed out into the snowy afternoon beyond Greg’s windowsill. They’re fifteen. 

“Do you miss him?” She asked suddenly, raising her hazel eyes from the endless glow of white, and Greg looked up from the broken wristwatch he had been fiddling with. She stared at him with hazel eyes, baby hairs sticking out from the messy bun she had pinned low on her head. 

Greg blinked. “Who?”

“Philip.” 

Greg thought about it for a second, absently turning the knob on the side and watching as the minute hand crawled in a crescent shape around the roman numerals; III, IV, V, VI. It stalled between VII and VIII, and he couldn’t get it to move any farther. 

He replied belatedly, “No. He can visit if he wants to. He hasn’t.”

Alice frowned, and he regretted saying it at all, in a way, even though he bitterly thought it might be true. “I don’t know if he can,” Alice admitted. “But I really miss him.”

Greg didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing at all, and let the silence swirl between them. He forced the minute hand to IX, his chest heavy and a sudden, childish sting pushing at his eyes.

The knob snapped off in his hand, and the wristwatch was unsaveable. He squeezed it in his hand until the metal left angry red indents, and thought, I miss him, too. 

-

Greg’s lighter is nestled in John’s carefully kept box of mementos, the most important collection of sentimental items from his life. It’s mostly photos, a letter or two, and there’s a plane ticket there. At the very bottom are his dog tags, an old button, a guitar pick, and Greg’s lighter.

“The culmination of my life,” he says, watching tensely as Greg studies the photos of him in rugby gear, his young, beaming face grainy like all aged photos. They’re sitting on the floor of John’s room, John with his knees folded into his chest and Greg with his legs stretched out over the floor. Greg picks up the button, and John gives an odd smile, halfway to a frown but still turned upward.

He tells Greg, “That was from my best friend’s sweater. He moved away when we were kids.” Greg smiles a little and sets the red plastic button gingerly back into the box. 

He brushes his fingers over the dog tags, briefly squishing the rubber wrapping around the edges that keeps them from making noise. _Watson, John H._ bumps serenely under his fingertips, and he traces the name over a few times. “What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”

“Hamish,” John answers. “But don’t tell Sherlock. I haven’t ever clarified it and I’m pretty sure he’s convinced it’s Henry.” Greg chuckled a little bit, and scanned the rest of what little information is provided on the tag.

“No religion?” 

John shakes his head, the odd smile returning. He reaches a fingertip out to brush against the _Agnostic_ printed at the bottom of the tag. “Not as such, no.”

Greg stares at the simple metal and slowly traps the chain in his palm. John watches it disappear into his fingers and closes his eyes shortly, resting his cheek on Greg’s shoulder. 

Greg flips past photos and letters, and his knuckles bump against the lighter. He pulls it out and studies the polished steel, his own initials returning the attention. 

“Oh,” John says, and he turns to press his lips into Greg’s shoulder. 

“I haven’t smoked in a long time.”

“No,” John agrees, and Greg smiles, squeezing the abandoned lighter in one hand, John’s dog tags in the other. He turns and catches John’s lips in his, and feels deliriously happy.

-

Philip killed himself when Greg was thirty. It wasn’t a surprise, and Greg wondered at that, but he realized that deep down it’s all been an infinite build to this point, beginning with that distant, depressed boy who failed to catch him when he slipped from the wet rocks in southern France. 

He overdosed. His drug problem was a vague idea in Greg’s mind, distant just like the memory of him had become, halfway across the continent and over a body of water he could never swim across. It had slipped, until it was simply a dull ache of disappointment, observable only when the words jumble and melt together on the page, a heavy, fluid, unreadable black. 

He didn’t leave a note. Not really, anyway. His last letter to Greg was only half decipherable, a mixture of fluent french and desperate, broken english, speaking of religion and forgiveness and death and hope and love and hurt and loss, and he ended it with a plead for all of those things from Greg, saying, “Je ne suis pas celui que tu voulais que je sois. Je suis désolé.” _I'm not who you wanted me to be. I am sorry._

It was as good as any note. Greg recognized it as what it was. It was a silence flooded with words, so many of them, everything that was and wasn’t said pressed into a flimsy piece of parchment. It was a goodbye; Alice’s hand in his, the wheels of his suitcase clicking in cracks like rain on the pavement, Philip’s hair growing and shrinking and growing and shrinking because Greg can’t bloody remember what he looked like.

Alice wept at his funeral, and Greg held her and felt like they were five again, rocking back and forth in mutual suffering when one of them had scraped their knees on the cobblestone. The blood dripped down their legs, and now the tears dripped down Alice’s cheeks, and Greg realized that he'd been mourning Philip’s loss since they parted as boys and the silence had echoed with everything that wasn’t said.

I love you, he thought into the droning noise of condolences, I love you. I forgive you. I should have told you. Do you hear me?

Philip’s face was snowy in death, and he looked at home amongst the lilies, sinking into the sturdy wooden coffin in a fine suit. Greg saw what he looked like, and it’s nothing like he remembers. The name on his headstone is carved so carefully, like ink on a page, and he cried at the grave because this silence means nothing. It is suffocating.

-

Greg’s hair is sticking on end, tingling down his neck with animalistic instinct. It yells danger, and he glances to his left, where Sherlock is perusing the contents of one of the endless cardboard boxes that are stacked in towers, and he picks something up, observing it, then drops it with obvious disdain. Some of the boxes have rotted or melted with the wood, mountains of material turned the consistency of oatmeal, and the ceiling creaks, water dripping through the beams in the short break from the drizzle.

John’s hand twitches and he glares into the darkness with narrowed eyes, skimming the maze of contents, and Greg breathes out shallowly. Sherlock glances at John and frowns, but doesn’t stop, stepping further into the dim. Greg flicks on his torch and the round, white light floods into the dingy aisles. The smell of mold swirls around his head and he covers his nose with his sleeve. 

Ahead of him, John grabs onto Sherlock’s coat, twisting the fabric in his fist tightly, and Sherlock stops dead in his tracks. Greg’s heart pounds in his ears, drums in his chest with violent apprehension, and John’s head turns minutely. 

“John,” Sherlock murmurs, and John puts up a hand. Sherlock pinches his lips thinly and watches as John turns slowly on his heel, a dim echo of the disturbed water from the puddle at his feet following the movement. His lips are parted, just barely, and his eyes dart around the shadows behind Greg’s head. He slides his hand behind his back and wraps his fingers slowly over the handle of his gun.

Greg’s scalp itches as sweat blooms across his hairline. John licks his lips and steels his expression, and suddenly in a flurry of movement, scattering a splash of dirty water at his feet, he lunges towards Greg. He grabs onto the lapel of his jacket and wrenches them together, the torch clattering to the ground, light flickering across the room, and Greg tumbles into a precariously balanced tower, toppling the boxes down in an avalanche of mold and rot.

A gunshot sounds, deafening among the crashing and shattering of the boxes and their contents, and it’s only then that Greg realizes John didn’t fall against the tower with him. Somebody yells, and Greg pulls himself from the crater of cardboard, diving for the torch. 

He fumbles with it for just a moment, cursing, then turns the light into the darkness toward the sounds of a scuffle. He hears heavy breathing, and a colourful string of curses and damning spews from an unfamiliar voice. Sherlock shows up beside him, his coat tickling Greg’s back because he’s still kneeled on the ground in the stale water, the concrete scraping on the palm of his hand.

The light falls on John and the suspect, John pressing his knee into the middle of his back and harshly holding his arms against his back, stretching them in a way that would sprain easily if he wanted to. The man struggles and yells, his clean-shaven face twisted into irite hatred, spit mixing with the water on the ground. 

Greg scurries off the ground, leaving the torch behind where Sherlock picks it up, and cuffs him, catching John’s eye briefly as the metal clicks into place around his wrists. Together they drag him from the ground while he snaps and swears and kicks. John slams his fist into the side of his head, growling low in his throat. There’s something wild in his eyes, and he grabs the suspect away from Greg, providing a barrier between the two with his body, and turns toward Sherlock.

“Behind you,” he huffs out around low breaths, and Sherlock turns, the light flooding over a gun that had skid across the ground. It’s not John’s. He picks it up and flicks on the safety, tucking it into his own waistband, much to Greg’s chagrin.

The suspect spits on the ground at their feet, a glob of blood landing just shy of the toe of John’s shoe. “Fuck you.”

John contorts his arm briefly, and he yells out, writhing uselessly in his grip. Three officers who had been collecting some of the contents further towards the entrance arrive, two with guns drawn and one juggling a torch in one hand and gun in the other, and are visibly relieved when they see that there’s no gunshot taken to any of them. 

The officer at the head of the group tucks her gun into her holster and quickly takes the suspect off of John’s hands, who gives him one more violent, aggressive jolt as a parting. She and the one with the torch leave, while the remaining officer stays behind to observe the aftermath of the tussle. There’s blood on John’s knuckles, and he wipes them on his jeans.

“Alright?” he asks Greg, still staring after the suspect. The light from the torch in Sherlock’s hand turns away and is joined as the young officer flicks on his own, looking over the crater of wet boxes and shattered glass.

Greg breathes, “Yeah.”

“Sorry for pushing you.” He clears his throat. 

“You shouldn’t be,” Sherlock interjects from behind, and Greg looks away from John’s profile silhouette to where Sherlock is rubbing his finger over a spot on an old wall. He moves his body out of the way and shines his light where his finger was, a grim expression on his face. “John’s saved your life, Lestrade.”

There’s a small, round, inconspicuous bullet hole embedded into the wall. It’s right where Greg’s head had been, and for a flash, Greg sees his own blood joining the mixture of mold and dirty water, splattered on the failing wall, glistening, red, and artless. He feels sick.

Greg looks at his silhouette again. “Thank you,” he says, and John’s head turns a little.

And John answers, like it’s nothing at all, “Of course,” and that’s the end of it, so they don’t speak about it, not yet. Not even when John grabs him at the end of the night and holds on like a drowning man holds a buoy, clutching and clutching as the sky cries and washes the smell of sweat and rot and blood from their clothes.

-

Sherlock had arrived at the scene of a fourth serial suicide, a woman decked out in garish pink dead on the ground. He brings with him a sturdy man with a good-looking, though tired, face, and eyes that are so blue you could drown in them if you only took the time to notice. His cane clicks softly when he walks.

The man was sitting in the plush red chair that sits across from Sherlock’s grey one in his sitting room when Greg had told him of the pink woman and the note, but Greg had failed there, because he didn’t notice. It wasn’t pressing. But it was very, very important, Greg realized later, when the chair had gained an owner in that sturdy man, and noticing him became the norm.

“John Watson,” he said his name was, and it’s a murder scene, but Greg can see the bemused interest in John’s expression as he slips the forensic suit over his comfortable jumper. Greg doesn’t gawk, and he barely notices, but John continues to arrive, and he continues to smile at Greg, and he slips into Greg’s life with the undetectable necessity of simple words that connect the ones you focus on, like ‘the’ and ‘and’ and ‘a’, and ‘was’ and ‘when’ and ‘in’, and ‘are’ and ‘were’ and ‘it’ and ‘will’ and everything in between.

Then he notices, and he beats himself for never noticing before, because John’s hands are gorgeous, and his eyes are fierce, and suddenly Greg can’t stop noticing. He’s intelligent and competent and good and fire sings in his veins; it seeps through his skin like sunlight when he grins, whispers a spark in his eyes when he’s catching his breath against a bricked alley in the depths of London, and burns an imprint into Greg’s skin when they touch.

And Greg thinks, with absolute devotion, you’re lovely, John Watson. Somebody should tell you so.

-

“John.”

“Hm?”

“I love you.”

John looks at him over his mug of coffee and the notebook in front of him, across the table, and Greg stares resolutely at his eyes. They gleam and spin with gold around the pupil, which grows with fondness and depth when he catches his gaze, and there’s a pause. The sparse dust in the air shimmers in the languid sun that peeks through the window. John spins his pen through the fingers of his left hand. Greg clutches his fork tightly in his right hand, an uneaten scoop of scrambled eggs falling off the edge and back into a heap on his plate.

It’s only the truth, a rule of life that’s so ingrained in Greg he can hardly talk about the world without feeling the need to declare it. The sky is blue, the Earth goes around the sun, we breathe to stay alive, and Gregory Lestrade is in love with John Hamish Watson. 

John sets the cup down and licks his lips. “I know,” he says, and Greg can feel the blush on his cheeks. “I love you, too.” Then he cups the stubbled line of Greg’s jaw and kisses him, but they’re both beaming, the smiles pulling at their lips until it’s mostly teeth, and John gives up with a boyish giggle that trembles through his fingertips. 

“Okay,” Greg replies breathlessly, closing his eyes with the overwhelming happiness of it all, only to open them again immediately after because he needs to look at John. Then he thinks, I might be able to spend forever with you. So he says, “I could spend forever with you.”

John agrees, “Yes,” and his voice brushes against Greg’s cheek wetly, sounding like tears and joy and everything that could ever be said. Greg is so in love, and John knows, and Greg thinks that this silence is beautiful, like the stillness before dawn, or the wind in his ears above the sea on those slippery, wet rocks, with the world at his feet and eyes blinded with blue.

Greg blows out a shaking breath, and John’s thumb swipes tenderly at the drop of tears that had built itself on his eyelid. 

“Okay,” he says again, and lets himself love in the midmorning, golden quiet, and is sure that John will hear.

**Author's Note:**

> So here’s this! It’s not perfect- pretty underdeveloped, flowery, awkward (the opening especially) and amateurish, but I’m proud of myself. It’s the most I’ve written in a long time and I think that the fandom needs more johnstrade, so here’s my contribution, even if it’s only okay :) hope you enjoyed


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